http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518213,00.html
It usually only takes about 6 minutes for an ambulance to get to the scene
In 6 minutes, you can die if you’re not breathing. Your lifeblood can pump out. A stopped heart can never restart. If you live where the average response time for an ambulance is more than 3 minutes, it is critical that you and those about you know emergency first aid; enough to keep someone in critical condition alive for either a drive to the nearest ER or the arrival of an ambulance.
The two most important emergency techniques you need to know are CPR and how to staunch severe bleeding. These two techniques will keep you breathing, keep your heart bleeding, and prevent you from losing so much blood you bleed out and die because all your organs fail from severe blood loss. Heart attacks fall in this category and often take less physical means of stabilizing, but could at any moment require CPR.
A close third is how to treat severe burns. Kitchen and cookery burns and burns from hot tap water are far too common an injury. Knowing how to treat them the moment they occur will reduce scarring and speed healing. Burns from a house fire or grass fire are less common, but given the frequency of wildfires lately, that could change. Knowing what to do in the event of a serious burn is important and you don’t want to wait 6 or more minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
Then you need to know how to stabilize a broken bone. You don’t necessarily need to know how to actually set the bone because we are presuming an ambulance will eventually arrive to cart you off to experts. But until that ambulance arrives, you want to keep that bone stable so it doesn’t get worse.
Then you need to know how to deal with someone on a bad drug trip or experiencing an overdose or sever allergy reaction. These all fall into pretty much the same category even if the methods are slightly different.
After these, you need to know what to do for severe pain that isn’t related to obvious bleeding, breaks, heart attacks, or burns, like the pain from an infected appendix or kidney stones.
There are a host of other things we need to think of as well – gunshot wounds if you live where a drive-by shooting could happen, stab wounds, dislocated joints, chemical burns in addition to the aforementioned fire and boiling water burns, bite wounds from people or animals (dog attacks are becoming distressingly common, often egged on by the dog owner if what we read in the news is correct), corneal abrasions, electric shocks, hypo- and hyperthermia, and poisoning. And, apparently also distressingly on the increase, is taser abuse. We need to learn how to treat people who’ve been over-tasered and I don’t think that information is widely disseminated. Most of the people who are over-tasered are people who are panicked, frightened, already wounded, mentally unstable, or are children who shouldn’t be tasered at all. Perhaps a combination of the knowledge of treating a drug overdose and heart attack could help someone who was over-tasered.
If you are involved in or at the scene of an accident with injury, you need to know what to do to both reduce further injuries and save the life of someone while waiting on that ambulance. It’s a tough call here. The law is on your side if you choose to do nothing at all, and against you if you do anything at all and the person decides to blame you instead of the one who caused the accident.
Unless the ambulance is right there, 6 minutes or more is a very long time to wait. In those six minutes, you can save your life or someone else’s. Learn what you need to know and refresh those skills at least annually. You can learn much of it through places like your local fire and police departments or the Red Cross. Some are free, some cost, but the price of the class is far less than the price of a life.
